Wednesday, July 19, 2006

(7:21 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Fun With the CTA Trip Planner

(I apologize in advance to my readers who are not familiar with Chicago's transit system.)

The other day, I wanted to make a trip from Lawrence and Western to Fullerton and Western -- a three-mile trip straight south. Western Ave. has a 24-hour bus, so the route wasn't in question, but I plugged it into the CTA Trip Planner because I wanted to know when I might expect the bus to come. I started getting some very strange results for the third possibility (they always give you three, even if there's only really one option), and I experimented with later and later start times until I started getting absolute monstrosities. Right now I can't get it to duplicate the very worst one, but here's something that's close:

A four-hour, incredibly circuitous trip to get somewhere that in reality only requires one step -- amazing. I don't have the exact times, so I'm basically just copying and pasting the times from the one above, but my very favorite went something like this:

What I like about this route is that you get such a good overview of the city -- first you go to the extreme northwest corner, then go all the way to downtown, then go deep into the southwest side, and finally (in a true triumph of inefficiency), end up taking the Western bus several miles north to reach a destination that was actually south of your departure point.

In all fairness, the two first options were always the obvious one -- it's only the third option that gives you the really baroque routes.